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Monday, January 3, 2011

There is a flurry of activity happening on Luckness in regard to projects - or the flurry is about to happen, its ramping up. There has been an actual flurry of research and my online searching of products and making decisions. The installation flurry is about to ramp up. More on this later.

I finished installing a new alternator today. That was nice. I cleaned the boat up afterwards, ran the engine in fwd for a little while monitoring the voltages making sure things were ok. I put away all the electrical tools and supplies I had strewn about and for a moment the boat was pretty tidy. I sat back and looked around, enjoying the moment of some more progress for the boat, getting better and better.

Then I pulled out a couple screwdrivers and started to take instruments out of my nav station. My nav station currently has a VHF, a battery monitor, a bilge control and a panel for my instruments. I'm going to be installing new TackTick instruments soon, so the instrument panel is no longer needed. I also wanted to rearrange the panel, and make it easier to work on.

After pulling most of the instruments out of the panel, the VHF was being stubborn and refused to come out. I've had the folks at YachtFitters (Terry and Justin) help me with a lot of work and occasionally I'll come across something they've done for me in the past and I'll sit back and admire what they did. As I do more work on my boat I can appreciate what they've done for me in the past more fully. The VHF was installed in a good spot in my nav station, but getting it there must have been amazingly tricky as access was incredibly difficult. Here's a picture of how the station looked at around 3pm today:

Getting at the VHF mounts required reaching in through the main electrical panel opening, around a hose from a deck scupper to its thru-hull, around to the radio at the edge of the space behind the panel. Then you have to unscrew and unbolt the fastener holding the radio on - with your finger tips. I don't know how they got it into that location, I wouldn't have gotten it in there.

Anyway, it needed to come out. I'm going to cut out most of the teak on the right side of the picture above, then cut a new piece of teak plywood to fit in the hole. I'll mount the new plywood with teak tabs on all four sides - so I'll end up with a service panel which can easily be removed so I can access the area behind the instruments easily, as well as work on their wiring/etc as needed. If in the future the instrument arrangement changes, I'll cut a new piece of teak plywood, cut holes in it to suite me and install it in place of what I'll have after this work. It should be much more flexible.

The only way I could find of removing the VHF was with my Fein tool - I cut it out. Here's the current picture, as of 6pm.

I no longer have a working VHF, other than my handhelds. Finishing will likely take all week. And I hesitate even giving that estimate, as in the past, I have needed to double or triple the estimates after seeing how long things really take...

Another in a long series of projects. I wonder when I benefit from all this work and start to experience the advertisers picture of sailing: sitting back with a drink in hand as the boat heads off into the sunset? More on this later...

I've just finished installing a new alternator. The boat came with a Hitachi 80amp alternator, with an internal regulator. For those of you not into the depths of DC charging, I'll try to keep this part brief. Although discussing alternators in a non-DC nerd way is difficult. You may want to skip ahead to the photo and then move on.

I never saw the old Hitachi charge at anything over 13.4 volts. This is way too low for a decent charge. Its perhaps ok for an automotive charger which only has to run the accessories and restore the charge the start of the engine took out of the battery. In a sailboat which may run its batteries down a lot since the engine was last turned on, you want the engine alternator to produce the most amperage as possible to bring the battery bank back up to as fully charged as possible in the time you run the engine. Its a sailboat, you don't want to run the engine more than necessary.

So anyway, since the old alternator wasn't charging the way I wanted, I looked around for alternatives. Balmar is the big name in marine alternators. That's what I have now. I didn't want to change the belts on my engine, and the maximum alternator for a 1/2" belt is 110amps. I now have a Balmar 7-series 110 amp alternator. There was a choice of a couple regulators they offered, I have the ARS-5. The ARS-5 is a good quality regulator which supports 3 stage charging - although that appears to be true of all the Balmar regulators.

As I ripped out all the old wiring I realized the old alternator was installed with 10 gauge wire. (A brief moment while people who understand the implications of this express a gasp of shock.) (Sorry, more DC current nerd talk.) While the wire runs where short, 10 gauge wire is small. If the 80amp alternator was trying to charge at its limit, this would result in over a 3% drop over 2 feet. It may partly explain why I never saw much output from the old alternator.

The new installation has 1 awg cable on the current side, which is pretty beefy. I approached the problem that if in doubt, over specify. I initially used the wiring harness that came as part of a package with the alternator (for $54) but ended up mounting the regulator in the lazarette to get it out of the heat and vibration of the engine. So the wiring runs got longer. After my initial tests extending the harness with 14 gauge wire I noticed a voltage drop across the wire from the alternator to regulator I wasn't happy with, so I ripped all the wiring out (again) and replaced it all with 12 gauge (for field, battery pos, neg and ignition.) The wiring harness I bought ended up being shredded and thrown away, but the final result is sweet. I initially installed a temperature sensor at the alternator, changed its mounting location once and later also installed a battery temperature sensor which was a little involved as the wiring run was a little round about as tends to happen on a sailboat.

I initially thought this might be a weekend project. Maybe two. It ended up taking longer, but I'm pretty happy with the results. All the wires are nicely sized and run, I have new beefy alternator belts (Dayco Top Cog) along with a new tool to tighten the belt (go to MSC industrial supply, search for BJ10 - thanks to the Balmar support person who passed that along.)

Here's a picture. It doesn't really tell the story. But the real story isn't about installing alternators....its what I do with all this work in the end.

About Me

I bought a boat in 2009 and over the next two and a half years got both the boat and myself ready for a longish sail. In September 2011 I left Seattle singlehanded to sail the route: Seattle; California; Mexico; Hawaii; Seattle. I stayed for a year and then left again, in 2013. That cruise lasted three years and had me visiting: California; Mexico; the Marquesas; Tuamotus; Society Islands; Beveridge Reef; Niue; Tonga; New Zealand; Minerva Reef; Tonga; Fiji; New Zealand; Hawaii and back to the Pacific Northwest where I'll stay for a while. Cruising is an amazing way of seeng the world, and I look forward to seeing some more of it in the future.